Magic, Children, Love & Food...

Primavera delves into the secret life of children and the secret life of mothers. It is a memoir of two childhoods, the author’s in the 1950’s and 60’s and her children’s in the 1980’s and 90’s. The book ranges seamlessly between the crazy, touching Italian-Australian life of Giulia’s childhood and the exhilarating Australian country childhood of Giulia’s children, Orlando and Sophia.

There is a pleasure of recognition in reading chapters about clothing, food, books and writing, language and love, sex, the body, music, memory and meaning, illness, birth and death. There is a novelistic gusto in the re-creation of aunts and uncles and family celebrations, a comic intensity of detail that pushes beyond the page so that the reader is drawn into an idiosyncratic and yet familiar world.

The lucidity of the writing leads through trails of memory and emotion to the reader’s own childhood and life. The reader travels from scenes of intimate domestic reality to the companionable speculation of essay and back again. The colour and consistency of dust, the mocking of teachers, the madness of mothers. What other book will give you instructions on cooking pasta properly and offer you reasons for writing, uses for death?

The book is articulated as a comic anatomy, with the pretence of exhaustive completeness (everything you ever wanted to know about…). Hence, the mocking suggestions of treatise and textbook: the lists and tables, the Catalogue of Cuddles, the classification of sand, the enumeration of pasta types.

But all the schemata in the world are ludicrously inadequate in the face of actual life as lived. This liberating realisation provides a beguiling underpinning to the book and is often conveyed ironically through the deflating comments of the children themselves. Likewise, all the hints and rules for parents ever dreamt of will prove puny when confronted with the joyful anarchy of family life. The book enacts its own meaning as it shows the stubborn, lovable human mystery that resists even the most valiant attempts at categorisation. A tender and comic dramatisation of that failure is the book’s highest literary achievement.